


What You Dream About

by ifyouwereamelody



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Idiots in Love, Kinda?, No Plot/Plotless, Or Idiots in Lust at Least, Quote Challenge, Seriously blame the quote it forced my hand, Smut, That's it that's the plot, They are on a ferry, Zutara Quote Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:29:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29414898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifyouwereamelody/pseuds/ifyouwereamelody
Summary: I got what you dream about / Nails scratchin’ my back tatt / Eyes closed while you scream out – Bad Things, Camilla Cabello, Machine Gun KellyKatara and Zuko get into some business that re-shapes their friendship on a boat ride to Caldera.Written for a quote challenge I did with some friends. Basically just completely gratuitous smut.
Relationships: Katara & Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 138
Collections: 2021 Song Quote Challenge





	What You Dream About

**Author's Note:**

> So it's been a wee while since I posted anything, and I do have my reasons. I'm working on a project at the moment that I'm kind of excited about, and I'm hoping that once it's done and I can share it with everyone that people will enjoy it!
> 
> For now, though, a few of us have been doing a quote challenge just to help us flex our writer brains and refresh after focussing in on some lengthier works.
> 
> Blame the quote I received for the barely-there plot. I honestly didn't feel like I could write anything other than smut for this one. 
> 
> Quote again in case you missed it in the summary:  
> I got what you dream about / Nails scratchin’ my back tatt / Eyes closed while you scream out – Bad Things, Camilla Cabello, Machine Gun Kelly
> 
> (I mean, for real -- what was I meant to do with that other than smut??)

_We’re being too loud._

‘Oh my god— Oh my _god_ , Zuk— Ah, _fuck_!’

Her back thumps fast, rhythmic, _hard_ against the wall behind her.

 _We’re_ definitely _being too loud._

Not that it makes a difference — she couldn’t keep it down even if she tried. Besides, it’s not like they know their neighbours. These people will only be in their lives for another day, and then they’ll dock at the port in Caldera and never see any of their ferrymates again. She’s not going to waste energy trying to choke back the noises that Zuko’s wringing out of her for the sake of saving them a few hours of awkwardness in the canteen tomorrow morning.

Zuko seems to have come to the same conclusion, groaning loudly against her mouth as she wraps her leg tighter around his hips and squeezes down on his cock.

‘Shit, Katara, do that again. How do you— _Fuck,_ you feel incredible. Everything about you is— Your smell, your taste, _god_ , I’m gonna come thinking about how you taste.’

She is too. The tang is still there when he kisses her, her first release still lingering on his lips from the time he spent with his face buried in her cunt. Her mind flickers back to the way he looked between her legs, eyes glowing in the darkness as he watched her shake apart to the rhythm of his tongue on her clit, and it’s so _fucking_ hot that she can’t—

‘God, _Zuko_!’

—can’t hold it back, can’t stay quiet. It’s unfeasible. Unthinkable. The needy break in her voice seems to spur Zuko on, his thrusts growing faster, deeper, his body scalding against hers as his fingers press bruises into her hips and he pins her even harder against the wall.

‘Leg. Up.’

Something sparks under her skin at the dark rasp of his command, flinging her onto a whole new plane of desire as she rises up off her tiptoes to wrap her other leg around him and pull him impossibly deeper into her. They’re pressed so close together, already so entangled in each other, that he barely has to move to take her weight. His hands slide from her hips to her ass, lifting her off his cock before thrusting up to fill her again, and the change in angle has her vision whiting out; she arches back, and her head cracks hard against the wall behind her, but the pain of it is dim behind the blinding force of everything else that she’s feeling. Zuko’s rhythm falters and he pulls away, concern pushing past the brassy, blown-out haze in his eyes.

‘You okay?’

It takes a moment for words to form in the frustrated whine that’s building in her throat at his slowed pace, and then when they arrive on her tongue they’re greedy. Urgent.

‘Yes, _yes_ , keep going.’

He grins, bright and triumphant in the dark, and swallows the rest of her cries as he brings his lips to hers and winds back up to a tempo even more gruelling than before.

Her breath has a will of its own, panting and cracked and leaving her light-headed in the wake of its rushing, and she in turn has no will left at all. Any lingering thoughts of the world outside his touch have been forgotten, leached out of her with the sweat that beads down between her breasts and gathers at the backs of her knees; now she is a creature steeped in sensation, not thought, existing only in the scrape of her shoulder blades against the wall and the desperation that throbs through her cunt with every stroke he makes into her. She’s beholden to Zuko’s hands and Zuko’s cock and Zuko, Zuko, _Zuko—_

This is all that’s left: a frenzied, rapturous assault on her senses born from the hot ferocity of his hold and the heady smell of _them_ that’s permeating the room.

He’s close. She can feel it in the heightened pounding of his hips and the scorching burst of breath he huffs into her neck as her nails sink into his back. And the roiling chaos of her own orgasm is barrelling forwards, too, _tearing_ towards her with tectonic force. She grinds down, matches his rhythm, and the pleasure churns up through her chest in an unbearably heated rush of _yes, fuck, don’t stop_ that leaves her mouth in a wordless, sobbing cry as his teeth rake at her shoulder and a shudder screams up the length of her back and she clenches around his cock—

She jolts awake, gasping loud and harsh in the quiet of the cabin as the dream fades away into the darkness. For a moment, she can’t make sense of the shift from sleep to wakefulness, her mind still saturated with visions of Zuko’s face on the brink of release, body still prickling from the memory — the imagined, delusional memory — of his fingers on her skin.

_What the fuck? What the—_

‘Katara? You okay?’

Zuko’s voice, roughened by sleep and far too reminiscent of the way he’d sounded in her dream. She can just make him out through the dim light in the cabin, propped up on an elbow and staring at her across the gap between their beds.

‘I— I’m fine, yeah.’

The quiver in her words refuses to be soothed and she grimaces, glad for the cover of darkness, at how blatant her lie sounds.

‘Are you sure? You sound— Bad dream?’

‘Yes! Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. A bad— Just a bad dream. I’m fine, go back to sleep.’

He stays motionless for a beat longer, no doubt frowning at her across the room, then lets out a grunt of concession and slowly settles back down, leaving her to the mess of her silent crisis.

 _Holy shit_.

The dream has well and truly melted away, landing her painfully back in the here and now and taking any vestiges of his touch away with it, but the buzzing tension that wound through her sleep has been left behind like debris deposited on the shore by an ebbing tide; the wetness between her legs is all too real, all too _much_ in this space where Zuko is so close by and yet so detached from the fantasy that’s left her pyjama shorts damp and uncomfortable.

 _It was a_ dream _. It wasn’t real. He doesn’t think of you like that, he’s your_ friend _. Pull your shit together, Katara, this is getting seriously out of hand._

Like a few stern words to herself are going to make a difference after three years of becoming more and more deeply entrenched in this ridiculous crush of hers. But it’s not as if there’s anything else she can do about it right now, so she settles for self-beratement and rolls over onto her side in the vague hope of getting a few more hours of sleep before she has to face Zuko for real in the morning — she’s so highly-strung, so swollen and sensitive from the wild run that her subconscious has played out for her, that the shift has her biting back a gasp as a deep, demanding throb pulses low in her belly.

She grits her teeth, clenches her fists, stares hopelessly at the blank wall in front of her...

The thought of lying here for the rest of the night, stretched taut with the pressure of her need for something she can’t have, unable to move without striking the spark that lies ready and waiting inside her, is unbearable.

 _Go back to sleep,_ she’d said to him.

_Yeah. As if._

* * *

Zuko’s just drifting off again when he hears it: a breath, nothing more than that, soft and catching in the silence of the cabin.

He frowns at the wall in front of him, uncertain, smoothing out his own breathing so that he can listen more closely.

 _Is she_ crying _? Fuck, some friend you are, rolling over and going back to sleep when there’s_ clearly _something wrong. Idiot._

Any moron could’ve noticed that things weren’t quite right with Katara; she’s been off from the moment they stepped onto the ferry, pensive and quick to start, shuffling awkwardly around him in the cabin they’ve been sharing for the last few days en route back to Caldera. He’s been trying to give her as much space as possible in the cramped quarters, putting it all down to homesickness after finishing their time in the South Pole, but now...

Now she’s jerking awake in the middle of the night, winded and shaken by whatever it is that’s pulled her up out of sleep, then crying to herself as he dozes no more than ten feet away.

Not homesickness, then, no — something’s really, really wrong.

He’s just opening his mouth to speak, his body just finding the tension it needs to pull him to sitting, when he hears it again, and this time something in the sound stops him short.

It’s the hitch, the hint of a gasp in her inhale. The slight rustling of bed covers. The barest shudder of a sigh as she releases her breath.

_Shit._

_Shit, shit,_ shit.

He clamps his jaw closed, every muscle in his body falling unnaturally still, and stares fixedly, unseeingly at the wall as the realisation hits him.

_She’s not crying, she’s—_

It doesn’t make sense, what’s happening right now. He doesn’t understand what the _fuck_ is going on or what kind of vindictive god he must have pissed off to find himself under this creative kind of torture, but the hyperawareness that the dark brings to his ears is all too revealing.

Another ghost of a gasp, and the sound of it reverberates through him, growing and warming under his skin until it’s full-bodied and red-hot — a head-spinning taste of what Katara might sound like without the restrictions of secrecy holding her back. It’s already too much to take, honing him down to something pointed and aching, and it’s hardly the last, he knows, of what he’s set to face as he lies stock-still in his lumpy ferry bed and listens to the whispers of his best friend’s ascent.

He could never have anticipated being so turned on, so utterly electrified by the noise of a mattress shifting, but the image it brings to mind of Katara moving, tilting her hips, arching her back as her fingers work between her legs, is sending bolts of something keen and insistent straight to his cock and—

_Fuck, no, stop. Fuck!_

He just manages to bite back a groan.

 _She thinks you’re asleep. She doesn’t know you can hear, she doesn’t_ want _you to hear, and— and she’s your_ friend. _This isn’t how she wants you to think of her._

Distraction, then. That’s the only thing for it. He runs through times tables, trade routes, the extensive menu at his uncle’s tea house... anything that he can focus on loudly enough to drown her out, _anything_ to drag his mind away from the thought of Katara and her breath and how much he wants to be the one making it quicken the way it is now.

There’s a second where it almost seems to be working, where he’s stuck trying to remember what comes between rooibos and spearmint on the Jasmine Dragon’s menu, but then something entirely new and completely undeniable comes careening through his defences and shatters into shrapnel against his temples:

A whimper escapes from between Katara’s lips, thready and fragile and pulled quickly back down into her chest, but irrefutably there. Irrefutably _eager._ And with it, Zuko can feel the end coming.

She sighs again, a breath that could almost become a cry on another night, in another place.

_Six times seven is forty-two, seven times seven is forty-nine—_

The mattress creaks once, twice.

_Gunpowder, hibiscus, hojicha—_

A rustle, a shift, and his hand fists in his bed cover.

_Oh my god._

Something that sounds like it could almost be halfway to a sob, and his cock throbs so hard it’s painful.

 _Oh my_ god _._

Three breaths, sharp and rising, and his mind’s eye is overrun with visions of her, flushed and frantic, mouth dropped open as she reaches her peak.

_Fuck, fuckfuckfuckfuck—_

Silence.

He doesn’t dare to move, doesn’t dare to breathe, but his heart is pounding loudly enough that he’s sure she’d be able to hear it if she weren’t, well, _occupied_ right now.

Then she exhales, fuller this time. Sated. He listens to her come down, listens to her breathing slow, listens as she rolls over and settles to stillness, and he...

He lies there — frozen, stunned, embarrassingly hard — so locked into wakefulness that he might as well have chugged ten cups of coffee before climbing into bed for the night.

 _Go back to sleep,_ she’d said to him.

_Yeah. As if._

**Author's Note:**

> Will there be more? Will we ever get to see how incredibly awkward they are the next day? 
> 
> I don't know. Maybe at some point. I do actually quite like ferry!Zuko and Katara, so I wouldn't rule out a second part to this further down the line when I'm not so busy.
> 
> Let me know your thoughts in the comments (I'm gonna be completely shameless and say that it's my birthday today, so any comments you have to give would be lovely)! Love to all. <3
> 
> (Also, it's rosehip.)


End file.
